Like many an adolescent boy, I was attracted by the books of Robert E. Howard. His brand of fantasy is best experienced in the black and white world of your teens, when the notion of stultefying evil represented by institutions such as schools seems more true to life, and when the desire to put the world to rights is strong.

More than any of his other writings, Howard’s Conan stories continue to resonate with audiences, tales of the barbarian who becomes a king popular with every new batch of 14 year old boys. Naturally, there’ve been comic and screen versions of Conan. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that macho director John Milius was attracted to making a movie of the barbarian’s adventures, co-writing the script with the equally manly Oliver Stone.

At the start of the film, Conan’s parents are slaughtered by sinister followers of a snake cult, which saves the story from being burdened with tales of family dispute. He’s taken away and tethered to a huge wooden wheel that he has to push around for no identifiable purpose, and some years of doing this builds him up until he has the body — and sadly acting skills — of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Every fantasy epic needs a larger than life villain, and Conan’s enemy is deadly serpent cultist Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones). One of Thulsa’s better lines (relatively speaking) is ‘What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?’, and that gives you some pointers to the dodgy politics of the film and genre. Some of the time you’re distracted from them by images such as Conan seizing a vulture with his teeth that pecks at him as he’s tied to a tree, or a magician painting the barbarian with runes to save his life after he’s taken down from it, but the might is right notion that’s at the heart of the genre keeps resurfacing.

There’s a new movie version of Conan in the offing, but what I’d be far more interested in is a film take on the extraordinary Norman Spinrad novel The Iron Dream. That book stopped me in my tracks and prevented me from getting any more enjoyment from much mainstream fantasy fiction. It consists of a heroic fantasy yarn allegedly written by an alternate world Adolf Hitler, followed by an equally dubious scholarly paper exploring the fascist politics implicit in the text’s imagery and plot. Now there’s a way to spoil someone’s innocent adolescent fun. Between The Iron Dream and a sociology lecturer at first year in university, who compared me to a concentration camp guard (his idea of provocative play with new students), I was losing all my enthusiasm for fascism.

Oh for a fantasy film that explores an anarchist utopia: that’d be far more interesting than yet another tale of kings and queens and their subjects. And how about the same in our science fiction? Star Trek is essentially American foreign policy conducted in outer space: what if the Enterprise was run along syndicalist lines instead of having the usual military hierarchy that these tales always do? Only the film of Starship Troopers dared send up the fascism inherent in its source material, and even then a lot of the audience didn’t get it. Same applied to The Iron Dream, some of whose readers complained about the stuff about Nazis interrupting their daily dose of heroic fiction.